The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

Candlelight

While it only remained so that the Master Bringer's plummet was only a result of ever-reaching gravity, their opportunity to victoriously initiate a raid of Northwest Waise had plummeted with them. Not only did the gates shut, but whatever devious trapdoor had enveloped them was also in the swift process of fastening its doors. The plunge, however dismaying, was swift as well, the sopping floor beneath them attracting an unwelcome painful sensation.

A candle rose topping an overworked wick gazed towards them as they regained their senses, whose carrier seemed all too nescient -- or perhaps simply aimless from an eternity of imprisonment -- to acknowledge their presence, tottering back into another corner of their new penitentiary, his head darting between each wall and the unclear visitors, whom he looked to hazily recognize. Flecks of green shone in his unfathomably brown hair, so close to black that it may have been considered neutral. To add to this, a pair of shattered glasses, potentially far too small for this probable Henderian's preference, lay undisturbed towards a quieter edge of the chamber: broken beyond repair, and potentially years in the process.

"George?" Irene muttered meekly as she stood, nearly hitting her head on the low-lying ceiling, and the owner of this cell slumped against the wall, as if unaware of these calls. Soal crept alongside her to the candlelight. "George, is that you? George..."

The Henderian jumped at the sound of her voice, perhaps now realizing its source, and in doing so knocked the wick to the stone floor, spilling out the light around their feet and plunging the room into complete darkness, bringing a yelp from all three of their parched lips. They all collapsed to the floor along with the candle, forming ripples in the water, unbeknownst to them.

The candle spontaneously returned in an instant, and for little reason. No match had been struck, and no fire had been tamed. Footsteps echoed from above, and a handful of crumbs of dirt (with some moss attached) fell through their earthen support, reaching their final destination solely on the heads (or hair) of the threesome, much to the disgust of the intruders.

Irene, seeing an opportunity, reached for the deserted pair of glasses nearby and slid them effortfully onto her old friend's eyes before her. They had been weathered by confinement and by isolation, and barely sat on his ears, but they appeared functional.

George's eyes fluttered open after a calm moment, and he shuffled around the room limply in response, as if a color-blind man had seen such chromaticity for the first time. "You haven't aged a day," he slurred, largely open to the interpretation of the Master Bringer. "And look at me. A ragged derelict in a subterranean cube, whose eyesight is no better than his past intellect. Why did you come back for me when I was only left here by the Formulator's obsession with revival?"

"George, what are you talking about?" Irene gritted her teeth, oddly only now remembering well George's former affection for her, which quickly developed into brooding bitterness upon the revelation of the Revolutes, all the way until his loss to Lint Corp in the stalemate battle with Gordon Gulley. "We can get you out of here. We can take you to Hendera -- the town."

"You don't need to teach me anything; I've learned all I need from the voices in my head," he mumbled, clearly driven wild by desolation. "When the candle burns, they teach me everything. Everything I need in as long as I have been here. Maybe five minutes, or maybe five years. As long as I know all they do, I can perform all they do. Want to come?"

"Is this really you, George? Who is she, then? Don't you remember Tynee, and the First Brigade?" Soal finally spoke, unflattered by George's hysteria. Irene peered wishfully into George's dull eyes, attempting to pry through his memory.

"Yes, it's me," he spat on the floor, only adding to its fluid content. "She's the poor Sketch-Jumper, and you're the important one. Neither of whom is capable of fetching their purpose in this rat-infested wasteland of... sod." George leaned against the wall, and the candle seemed to increase in intensity, somehow illuminating a broad and unsettling corridor to their left, its exit never specified. Simultaneously, a foreboding crash began to emanate from its direction, as if it were the sound at the end of the tunnel. "You could have left at any time."

"George, you're out of your mind!" Irene gagged as she and Soal stepped into the hall. "You have to follow us out of here. And you have to drop that candle. You're only being controlled."

"I'll burn you if I have to."

"Follow us!" Soal shrieked over an intensifying noise, their approach through the tunnel imminent.

"Only with the candle," George traced his passage after them, and eventually alongside them, the wick in hand, and his eerie calls echoing between the walls of the dungeon. "Don't forget about your job, of course."

Irene sighed, knowing that George, her longtime companion, was bound to fall to the same currently inevitable doom of prophecy through insanity. Peregrin Cliasin had done it, Moth was on the verge of doing so, and now, George looked to be next in the line.

His candle refused to die, but it was no longer necessary, and the tunnel ended as the crashing reached a crescendo -- that is, the crashing of waves upon the boundaries of the semispherical Waise Wells, where a measly canoe, similar, if not identical, to Hemingway's, awaited them. Rather unusually, the tunnel's abrupt conclusion was met with the same water that dampened the cell, and, even more so, the liquid that once, and speculatively always, remained tranquil even under immediate pressure, was now bending to the will of a tide that looked to originate from the center of the wells. Both Soal and Irene had been here before with the pseudo-Sulukridger and were aware that there was a physical exit. But the source of the tides at the center gleamed with a pink hue the brightness almost that of the sun, hovering above where ripples originated, conducting a surge of energy beneath the pool in a whirlpool of the Rift's strength.

"There are twenty Vorrens in these waters," George eased his grip on the wick, and raised his eyebrow, staring directly into the source of power as if hypnotized. "You two -- Meet the harbingers of avarice themselves: the Suseron Incarnations."